Yancey on J.D. Unwin

While much of the media was buzzing about a new survey on sex in modern America released in 1994, I was thinking about a book, Sex and Culture, published in 1934...

Seeking to test the Freudian notion that civilization is a byproduct of repressed sexuality, the scholar J.D. Unwin studied eighty-six different societies. His findings startled many scholars, above all Unwin himself, because all eighty-six demonstrated a direct tie between absolute monogamy and the "expansive energy" of civilization. In other words, sexual fidelity was the single most important predictor of a society's ascendancy.

Unwin had no religious convictions and applied no moral judgement. "I offer no opinion about rightness and wrongness." Nevertheless, he had to conclude, "In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on prenuptial and post-nuptial continence."

For Roman, Greek, Sumerian, Moorish, Babylonian, and Anglo-Saxon civilizations, Unwin had several hundred years of history to draw on. He found with no exceptions that these societies flourished, culturally and geographically, during eras that valued sexual fidelity. Inevitably, sexual mores would loosen and the societies would subsequently decline, only to rise again when they returned to more rigid sexual standards.

Unwin seemed at a loss to explain the pattern. "If you ask me why this is so, I reply that I do not know. No scientist does. . . You can describe the process and observe it, but you cannot explain it." Yet the trend so impressed him that he proposed a special class of Alpha citizens in Great Britain. These individuals of unusual promise would take vows of chastity before marriage, all for the sake of the empire, which needed their talents.

. . . Without realizing it, ...Unwin may have subtly edged toward a Christian view of sexuality from which modern society has badly strayed. For the Christian, sex is not an end in itself, but rather a gift from God. Like all such gifts, it must be stewarded according to God's rules, not ours.

Philip Yancy
Finding God in Unexpected Places